This invention relates to an MSK signal detector for detecting the presence or absence of a signal modulated by minimum shift keying (MSK).
Minimum shift keying, which is a type of phase-continuous frequency shift keying (FSK) with a 0.5 modulation index, produces a constant-envelope signal having the advantage of immunity to output amplifier saturation effects, so MSK is coming into use in many types of digital communication equipment. One component of a receiver in such digital communication equipment is an MSK signal detector that detects incoming MSK signals, to prevent malfunctions in next-stage equipment when a noise signal is received.
A prior-art MSK signal detector operates by doubling the frequency of the input signal. If the input signal is an MSK signal, this produces a frequency spectrum with two strong lines, which are extracted by a pair of bandpass filters, further processed by wave folding circuits, and combined in an analog adder. The combined signal is passed through a low-pass filter and thresholded by a comparator which outputs an MSK detect signal. If the input is not an MSK signal, there will be no strong spectral lines for the bandpass filters to extract, the output of the low-pass filter will be below threshold, and the comparator output will indicate that no MSK signal is present.
A disadvantage of the prior-art MSK signal detector is that it uses numerous analog circuits: the bandpass filters, wave folding circuits, adder, low-pass filter, and their attendant operational amplifiers. Integrated onto a semiconductor signal-processing chip, these analog circuits take up excessive space and dissipate excessive power.